This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

"Transformers: Age of Extinction": yes, the best part of the film was shot in China (including Hong Kong) and is politically correct for the "People's Republic"

I took up the theory of Ezra Klein (Vox Media) about “Transformers:
Age of Extinction” (that is, “Transformers IV”) and saw the 166-minute
Paramount epic, directed by Michael Bay, late last night, after the
storms. Writing the script would have
been a monumental job for Ehren Kruger.

Indeed, the last 45 minutes, set in China (Beijing as well as Hong Kong) make
the best part, and the photography of both cities is spectacular. I didn’t know that some of the high-rises in
Hong Kong are really ragtag. (Other than
this, there is nothing to make the Chinese government look too bad.) Are those
caves really on the same island as Hong Kong, or somewhere in SE China? Anyway,
this film will do well in China. It’s
not something that I could personally aspire for with my won film ideas.

The idea of aliens as “organic robots” is logical enough –
having transformed themselves into machines so they can transit space-time. The look reminds me a bit of several movie
traditions – “Alien” movies, “Jurassic Park” (why are they shaped like
dinosaurs and velociraptors?) and even the hive-spaceship of “Independence Day”. And the machines become real characters.

The film is also set on the plains of Texas, and there is an
earlier battle for Chicago.

Now Cade Yaeger (Marky Mark Wahlberg) is an inventor, and
some of his lines reminded me of the battles going on right now about patent
trolls. His daughter Tessa (Nicola
Peltz), 17, has a charismatic boyfriend Shane Dyson, 20 (Colorado-born Jack
Reynor) who gets to figure into the heroics later. But fairly early there is a curious
distraction back in Texas. Cade
questions Shane about his having a relationship (never shown explicitly) with
an “underage” daughter, and threatens Shane, who pulls out a printout of the
Texas “Romeo and Juliet” law. Actually,
the age of consent in Texas is 17, so the relationship would have been
legal. I wondered why this thread was in
there.

In any case, Shane (the actor is just 22) is so charismatic
that I wondered if he was conceived as a heterosexual counterpart to “Shane Lyons” in the “Judas Kiss” movie. Timo Descamps had played that character, but
that reminds me of something else. There’s
no more Sam Witwicky played by “Hiya” Shia LaBeouf, of comparable swagger; I
thought, well, this move could have used Richard Harmon (“the greatest of all
time”) as a character in the Shia vein. I
guess, it doesn’t pay for some actors (Shia) to become bad boys. Remember, Shia
did a bang-up job hosting SNL for NBC at the age of 20, before he could legally
drink.

As for the plot synopsis, it’s long and intricate (on imdb),
and I don’t think it presents a very realistic ide of CIA ops.

I did make mental note of an opening scene, where the Transformer machines are hovering over a deep valley on another planet. Was that "Arinelle" (the name that National Geographic gave to a fictitious planet in its 2005 documentary "Extraterrestrials"? If so, it should be shown as tidally locked.

The site is here (Paramount).
Paramount’s musical logo can go head-to-head with Fox and Lionsgate
when it’s used.

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